Mark Vanderbeeken

EU tells countries to make plans to cope with 3C of global warming ft.trib.al/g12dl5M

"The debt is expected to carry a BB- rating, which sits near the top of the range for below-investment-grade credits, according to Bloomberg." qz.com/bending-spoo...

According to some, "resilience is less about helping communities and more about transferring responsibility from institutions to citizens." theconversation.com/as-flood-ris...

"Many in western publics [...] have become consumers of politics and treat it like a streaming subscription or a delivery app: they expect results, immediately, on demand. [...] Those politicians who unreservedly engage with the voter as a consumer [...] are the ones who prevail."

"Russia has an estimated US$2.15 billion (£1.63 billion) annual budget for information manipulation. And China spends more, at an estimated US$10 billion (£7.6 billion)." theconversation.com/the-new-batt...

Giorgia Meloni: AI-enabled biometric identification will be used to name those who hide behind a hood or a ski mask.

"What is being envisioned [with Europe's push for Industrial AI] is just more dependency, moved down a level from the cloud into the factory. Vassalage with a bow on top."

"AI is by its nature an imperial technology. [It] has an inherent center-periphery structure. Control of frontier AI and its rewards are concentrated in a handful of firms in China and the United States. Everyone else is a dependent user."

SONDAGE BFMTV. Présidentielle 2027: Édouard Philippe, Raphaël Glucksmann et Jean-Luc Mélenchon donnés au coude-à-coude derrière Marine Le Pen Six mois avant le premier tour de l'élection présidentielle, la candidate du Rassemblement national continue de faire largement la course en tête,...

🚨 BREAKING: Elon Musk personally proposed slowing down Ukraine’s Starlink access, and Trump agreed, The Telegraph reports, citing four sources. Musk reportedly later feared backlash from European customers and publicly denied responsibility, blaming the White House instead.

NEW: Virtually every news organization has a Meta business account. Meta’s new terms say it can scrape websites “associated with” those accounts—and use the content to “train” its products. @andrewdeck.bsky.social and I on what this means for publishers: www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/meta...

you can't be serious. This reads Meta/Facebook/Insta is looking to grant itself the rights to scrape websites across the open web - and train Meta's AI - if a company after Oct 30, 2026 uses Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or other Meta services. So every biz. Read that again. Outrageous. 1/5

NEW: The founders of a startup called Outlit argue that the future of B2B sales is constant, AI agent-powered surveillance. “It’s one page, and it’s always updating,” one founder said of the platform, “and it’s all of everything we can find on them at all times." futurism.com/artificial-i...

Moderation is at the moment in the hands of Bluesky even if you are on another AT protocol like @eurosky.social or @leafplaza.eu or use @mu.social. That is not an argument against migration, but the contrary: we should strengthen them so they can reach the scale to manage their own moderation.

Video – Epstein scandal: How Jeffrey Epstein used Woody Allen to expand his network

European leaders have been unable to explain why releasing oil reserves just before a risky winter with likely supply disruptions due to the Iran War will help their citizens. They should just be honest: they felt they had no choice but to surrender to 🇺🇸extortion.

Europe is Running Out of Energy—and Ideas by @daliborrohac.bsky.social www.persuasion.community/p/europe-is-...

“Losing the data on 20 million federal employees to the Chinese was bad. But you knew the Chinese weren’t going to sell or publish it.” Me in The New York Times ($, £) on why the hack of the FBI could, if confirmed, be one of the worst data breaches of all time. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/28/u...

EXTRAORDINARY HEAT IN EUROPE Almost 32C in Germany today,over 30C in Switzerland, 33C in France and this is just the beginning of a heat wave which will completely rewrite European climatic history with several thousands records smashed by even 5/6C margins. HISTORIC

Europe is living its most extreme heat event in its history with 6 days >40C at the end of September 41,3C yesterday at Seville Thousands of stations up to 5C above their late September records 4000+ stations in Western,Central and Northern Europe will break records next days.

🤖 Will the profits of #AI companies trump data protection? In a #leaked document, the Irish Presidency proposes to #EU Member States that, if they train or use an AI product, companies should automatically be assumed to have an overriding “legitimate interest”. 👉 Read more: noyb.eu/en/ai-eu-mem...

Now data centers (hence AI) also have a PFAS problem.

Jeffrey Sachs this weekend in Italy to speak "as expert" at "Forum dell’Indipendenza italiana", the festival of the far right Futuro Nazionale (Roberto Vannacci), where the AfD is guest of honor, and at "Nova", the festival of the populist left 5 Star Movement (M5S of Giuseppe Conte). 😵‍💫 #redbrown

"The challenge is no longer about keeping a “human in the loop”, but ensuring that when we do, humans retain the skills, judgment and agency that make their presence meaningful." Very good point by @gevansjones.bsky.social in @theconversation.com theconversation.com/human-safety...

"Europe installed 36 GWh of new battery energy storage systems (BESS) in 2025, bringing its total operational capacity beyond 100 GWh for the first time. This is enough stored energy to power around 75 million homes." Liam Gilliver in @euronews.com www.euronews.com/2026/09/01/h...

“Data centres do not constitute sovereign AI capability. Countries may host facilities but dispersion of hardware does not equal decentralisation of power.”

The number of 11- to 24-year-olds in England with no close friends has risen fivefold since 2014 as a result of growing up in a “bleak world” dominated by austerity, the pandemic and social media. Fivefold. www.theguardian.com/society/2026... Source: www.ippr.org/media-office...

“Orwell gave us the language for the world we feared; Huxley gave us the description of the one we’re now building with every willing decision. Europe has spent its regulatory energy preparing for the first – it is past time to prepare for the second.“ www.euractiv.com/opinion/our-...

"Amid the infighting over textual purity, individual users are being blamed for AI slop instead of the social media platforms that motivate its distribution. This prioritizes the symptom over the disease." www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

How to design a space habitat that supports its residents’ mental health A new online platform helps engineers look beyond survival mode when designing habitats for extreme living conditions. news.mit.edu/2026/how-spa...

Banks across Europe face uneven climate risks: exposures to weather-related vulnerabilities range from below 10% to over 55%, highlighting striking disparities.

« The European Environment Agency reckons that between 1980 and 2024 extreme weather events, including floods, storms and droughts, caused €822bn of damage, a quarter of it in the past four years alone » www.ft.com/content/7190...

The brutally hot summer is set to cost the EU economy €180 billion this year — that’s equivalent to roughly 1 percent of GDP, which is all the growth the bloc was expected to generate in 2026, according to new analysis.

"Jens Schwanen, director of German inland shipping federation BDB, told Rheinische Post that the water level at Kaub, a key bottleneck for Rhine shipping, is expected to fall below 10 cm for the first time because of a lack of rainfall. On Monday morning, the level there stood at 16 cm."

The only thing that keeps Musk’s platform alive is us — the politicians and institutions it wants to destroy.

A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers, Aaron Horwath writes. #grandmahobbies #futureofwork #ai #bullshitjobs

Current rate of global warming is 10-15 times faster than those following recent glacial periods. It is 6 times faster than the fastest known global warming event: the Eocene Thermal Maximum (56 million yrs ago) when the Earth’s average temp. rose by 5-8 degrees over the course of about 20,000 yrs.

We talk less and less. Some researchers blame the internet; others blame the erosion of small, everyday interactions with strangers. The latter implies that we know less and less about those strangers, eroding the social fabric that our democracies rely upon.

Why you’ll soon be AI’s assistant (and not the other way round) | Cory Doctorow @doctorow.pluralistic.net interviewed by @vprotegenlicht.bsky.social (English) www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOnv...

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